Hello, There's one aspect of this debate given little attention in submissions to the bug report: It is entirely possible that both Gnome 1 and Gnome 2 are desirable in the next Debian release.
At the moment, Gnome 2 is clearly not a desirable replacement for Gnome 1 for everyone. It is not popular to be pessimistic, but at the moment it is not clear when or if Gnome 2 will ever be a desirable replacement for all users. That may or may not happen before the next Debian release. Therefore, the release manager may wish to have the flexibility of releasing both Gnome desktops. Raphael's "solution two" is the only one that allows this flexibility. -Steve
